Mary says that for a while she cleaned for a woman a few streets away from us. “A well-known bitch,” she claims.
Mary may clean for money, but this group is her real vocation. She has clearly made herself the leader, and if she has to swat a few drunks or some addicts’ asses to keep them straight, she will.
In the church basement, there are six or eight people, including a guy who looks like a construction worker; a clean-cut middle-aged man who is perhaps a salesman; a housewife type, going at her gum; a tattooed boy slender enough to pack and fold. I fix on a tough-looking young woman with a bad complexion and short shorts who has just been released from a women’s shelter. Her drug is meth. I understand the attraction. Anything that took me up was good. Back in the old days, I never wanted to be down, or sleep, or even nap.
When the woman heads off to the bathroom, Mary whispers, “Float-through. Comes and goes, gets a day or two, then meets some new asshole and it’s off to the races.”
Still, when the girl comes back, Mary grabs her hand and rests it in her own lap, where its sweat leaves a few fingers.
The young woman is named Brittany, as about a quarter of the women in this state seem to be. She has a pack of Camels rolled in her T-shirt sleeve and taps her foot in the air. Her face is slick, drenched with sweat; this room is hot, closed, and still, and she is detoxing. Recovery hurts. Every feeling you escaped comes to slap you in the face.
. . .
Seven years or so after my first recovery, I relapsed. I never told anyone why or how because the truth sounded like such an excuse, something to let me off the hook. But what happened was this: I had a book to edit, a book about the James family that was eight hundred pages long. My company had paid way too much for us to earn our money back unless it was . . . perfect. I had a week to do the job and it had complicated problems. I wanted it to be perfect, so I took speed and stayed up for days and the work was actually good. Never had Henry James flown through life with such exuberance. Alice? What a charmer. But I lost it. I couldn’t stop using. It all accelerated very fast. I did what I had never done: I lied and lied, stopped talking to sober people, missed work, fell asleep at meetings, did things I have a hard time claiming, though the voices in my head have never forgotten.
A few months later, I found myself sitting on the steps in front of my apartment building with a suitcase and a trash bag full of unmated socks. I was on my way to rehab in Pennsylvania, waiting for a friend to pick me up. My suitcase was full of dirty clothes, the only kind I had. The socks were in the bag because I had at first forgotten to pack them and didn’t want to open my suitcase again. I was tired, coming down: It seemed too much to try to open that suitcase one more time.
A few days before, I had overheard one of the executives at work, a decent woman, holding nothing back, talking about me. I have never been suicidal, don’t believe in it, but I might have gone out the window if I had been able to unlatch it. At home, I got higher than ever, and as I was bare and empty, the voices hit full attack mode. I lay facedown on my pillow, almost disappeared for good. I did not want to breathe.
I think people who have always felt okay in the world will never understand those of us who haven’t.
. . .
Mary asks Brittany, the newcomer, if she wants to talk, but the young woman shakes her head. “Y’all know my story,” she says. “I ain’t never going to get this right, and I might as well just keep going. The center made me come. I don’t want to be here.”
Mary reaches out, encircles Brittany with her arm, and pulls her head down onto her shoulder. I think Mary’s hair is going to fall down for sure, but it does not. Sometimes a few decades of Final Net are all an honest woman can count on in this life. When tattoo boy gives Brittany a nasty sort of once-over, Mary shoots him a look that could burn the rest of the crops.
. . .
In the car to the rehab in Pennsylvania, I thought of the many great Americans who have made such a pilgrimage: Truman, Liza, Elizabeth Taylor, maybe an Allman brother. At a truck stop on the highway, we stopped for coffee, and as I paid I noticed that for some reason I was holding my trash bag full of socks.
At the rehab, they put me first into an infirmary to detox and it was freezing. A man who looked a little like Jesus said the last time he was in the infirmary, a woman had tried to eat her coins and keys.
It was October in Pennsylvania and on the first morning the ground was frosted. As I walked to breakfast, some guy yelled out, “Thirteen inches in the Poconos.”
“Is that a porn film?” I asked.